Sniggle Theory

“A prank can be a multi-functional tool like a hammer
— you can hit somebody over the head with it, or pound nails with
it. Pranks are techniques to change life with; they’re based on principles
that are not widely known or recognized. People can learn and apply these
techniques — not to steal money from other people, but to set up
situations for themselves enabling them to do more of what they want to
do. The point is to discover and get familiar with the principles that
apply…”

— Monte Cazazza

There have been more than a few things written about sniggling in its
various guises. I’ll note a bunch of them here and trust you to search
out more based on your own interests.

Hakim Bey is one of the more prolific
and talented apologists for
Art Sabotage and
Poetic
Terrorism. “Weird dancing in all-night computer-banking
lobbies… Bolt up brass commemorative plaques in places where you
have experienced a revelation or had a particularly fulfilling sexual
experience… small fetishes abandoned in parks &
restaurants…”

One manifesto to come out of the Diggers was
Trip Without a Ticket
(a.k.a. “Who Paid For
Your Trip?”). This outlines some of the theory behind
the “Free Stores” and explains that
“this is theater of an underground that wants out. Its aim
is to liberate ground held by consumer wardens and establish territory
without walls.”

“A Soy Bomb is
a spontaneous act of individuality that disrupts the flow of Corporate
Cheese. Soy in Spanish means
‘I
Am,’ and a ‘Soy Bomb’ is an
Explosion of SELF amidst a sea of
cheese.” This according to the manifesto of the
Soy Bomb Nation,
which erupted after Michael Portnoy’s performance at the 1998 Grammys.

American labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn made a fine case for
sabotage
in the workplace as a tactic for organized or disorganized labor. “The
strike is the open battle of the class struggle, sabotage is the guerrilla
warfare…”

The
Surveillance Camera Players
have published a guide to the
Guerilla Programming of Video Surveillance Equipment.
“The basic concept of guerilla programming is simple: a group of
individuals create a scenario and act it out using surveillance cameras as
if they were their own, as if they were producing their own program, and as
if the audience consisted of security personnel, police, school principals,
residents of upper-class high security neighborhoods, and the producers and
salespeople of the security systems themselves.”

Jihad Jerry says: “Pranks should never be thought of as menial, or light, or pejorative, even.… Because pranks are confrontational; pranks are creative; pranks are in that realm of transgressive art; a creative response to ludicrous situations that people find themselves in, in society, faced with illegitimate authority, illogical explanations, and mind-sets that are very, very unhealthy. A good prankster, basically through a creative act, breaks through all of that, and questions that and makes other people participate in that questioning.”

Mark Pilkington interviewed some of the artists responsible for creating
the
crop circle phenomenon.
“I see our work,” one said, “as the continuation of an unseen tradition
of artists working covertly in the realm of the paranormal, from the Turin
Shroud to the Roswell Alien Autopsy film.”

Opportunities for a more-or-less captive audience for soul-satisfying
pranksterism happen every time you’re called up by some minimum-wage
telemarketer who wants to sell you something.
Don’t waste your opportunity!

Mark Dery’s essay
Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs
is a frequently HTMLized inspirational text about “guerrilla semioticians”
who are “in pursuit of new myths stitched from the material of their own
lives, a fabric of experiences and aspirations where neither the depressive
stories of an apolitical intelligentsia nor the repressive fictions of
corporate media’s Magic Kingdom obtain.”

Mark Dery continued his culture jamming-themed interview series by
interviewing
Stuart Ewen
for Adbusters, who says:

[N]ot only are mass media images intrusive into nearly every second of
people’s waking lives but… increasingly, these images are penetrating
into the most intimate recesses of people’s inner lives, their fantasy
realms of desire and fear. We need to recognize that media images,
increasingly, are sales pitches; that, rather than merely depicting or
entertaining, they are instrumental in the sense that they are designed
to gather audiences, designed to motivate certain kinds of behavior. So
not only is our culture a pervasive media culture but… a media culture
which has at its heart ideas of behavior modification and I would say, to
some extent, social control….

Culture jammers draw upon the given facts of our society, this cacophony
of fragmentary media images, to describe things as they are. But I think
that at the heart of their reassemblings is the hope that there could be
another kind of world, a world where rather than incoherence there could
be coherence, rather than a devaluation of the human in favor of the
commodity there could be an understanding of the commodity in the service
of the human.

Luther Blissett’s manifesto
Notes on the Nature of the
Conspiracy starts by “affirm[ing] that the nihilistic tyranny of the
spectacle could be faced and fought by ‘talking big and telling tall
stories,’ i.e. by raising a whirl of fibs and lies ‘till a communication
short-circuit dissipates the virtual world and the real one will settle
again’ (Paul Virilio). In fact,” Blissett reminds us, “a radical
criticism of the world order, and even the right to criticize, was an
achievement by the ‘plagiarist’ pirates of the past centuries, i.e. by
rascals, buffoons and court jesters.”

He’s started to run workshops, a sort of
Culture Jamming 101,
to teach people how to apply these techniques.

The call for
Action, Not Art
notes that “‘Art’ is approached, sought out, deliberately examined;
and because people know they’re going to expose themselves to ‘Art,’ they
throw up that shield of critical distance. When they encounter a subtle
prank or covert action that is disguised as part of their daily routine,
they’re wide open to it.”

The Yippies, American snigglers from the late 1960s and early 70s,
were pioneers of modern guerilla theatre — and
Abbie Hoffman’s textbook of
underground living and warfare,
Steal This Book
is a classic textbook.

I tried handing out copies of a Yippie pamphlet by the name of The
School Stoppers’ Textbook to some schoolkids in my town, hoping that it
would inspire the prisoners of the public schools to acts of rebellion
appropriate to the circumstance. I was met by five people with badges who
informed me that the First Amendment did not apply to this particular piece
of writing. I was held in prison with bail set at $40,000 and eventually
convicted for (I kid you not) nothing more than handing out leaflets on a
public sidewalk. So the people who publish this text on-line at places like
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
here,
and
here are in danger of persecution if any California student clicks their way to
the page.

Helpful tips on pranking
Talk Radio
are available on-line, and those of you Kommunikationsguerillas with some
fluency in German will definitely want to take a look at the
Guerjia Culturale
site.

Robert Anton Wilson,
founder of the
Committee for the Surrealistic Investigation of Claims of the Normal, is
also a proponent of what he calls Guerrilla Ontology:
“Ontology is the branch of philosophy that tries to understand what’s real
and what isn’t, or what’s the difference between real reality and mere
appearance… our approach is to knock down everybody else’s attempt to
settle the question.”

The magician’s art involves a professional interest in the same sort of
manipulation of attention and belief that snigglers also use in their
pranks. Read Vincent Gaddis’s
The Art of Honest Deception
for an overview.

Prankster first class
Joey Skaggs
was kind enough to include a
manifesto
on
his site:
“[P]ranks camouflage the sting of deeper, more critical denotations, such
as their direct challenge to all verbal and behavioral routines, and their
undermining of the sovereign authority of words, language, visual images,
and social conventions in general… Pranks are the deadly enemy of
reality. And ‘reality’ — its description and limitation — has always been
the supreme control trick used by a society to subdue the lust for freedom
latent in its citizens.”

“In its search for seeds of subversion,” according to the text
What about Communication
Guerrilla?, “guerrilla communication tries to take up contradictions
which are hidden in seemingly normal, everyday situations. It attempts to
distort normality by addressing those unspoken desires that are usually
silenced by omnipresent rules of conduct, rules that define the socially
acceptable modes of behaviour as well as the ‘normal’ ways of communication
and interpretation.”

The
Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy
note that “[w]e live in a society which advertises its costliest
commodities with images of death & mutilation, beaming them direct to
the reptilian back-brain of the millions thru alpha-wave-generating
carcinogenic reality-warping devices — while certain images of life (such
as our favorite, a child masturbating) are banned & punished with
incredible ferocity… We have a black bomb for these æsthetic
fascists — it explodes with sperm & firecrackers, raucous weeds &
piracy, weird Shiïte heresies & bubbling paradise-fountains,
complex rhythms, pulsations of life, all shapeless & exquisite.”

The
manifesto
of The Coalition to Raise Æsthetic Consciousness warns that the
“anti-æsthetic is not confined to our prisons and hospitals… We
find it in the sprawling housing projects of our urban centers, in the
1960s cement-block architecture of our college campuses, in the endless
tracts of identical, vinyl-sided suburban homes, and in the windowless,
aluminum pole-barns that have sprung up to provide cheap real-estate for
retail stores…. [E]very minute, the anti-æsthetic infects a new
portion of our world… — when we have at last completely forgotten what
our earliest ancestors knew about the importance of beauty — then our
whole world will be as a prison, and we will live like prisoners….”

“Culture jamming will become to our era what civil rights
was to the 60s,” says
writhe.

Team 7
(A Renegade Architecture) declares: “It is with great disregard for all
economic, socio-political, and legal boundaries that we at Team 7 launch
the first phase in the people’s reclamation of the true urban
infrastructure.”

The
Directive of the Disumbrationist League
calls for the “parasitic infection of culture” to be “buffooned into
shruggery” and notes that “a Disumbrationist vanguard is the only plausable
savior in a world where the machines of order have finally lost their
credibility.”

Ben Shepard tackles the absurdist and paradoxical street theater that
erupted during the reign of the
U.S.A.’s George II at the
beginning of this century. In his essay
Absurd Responses vs. Earnest Politics: Global Justice vs. Anti-War Movements; Guerrilla Theater and Aesthetic Solutions,
Shepard says “[t]he aim of an absurd response would be to
create a brand of protest which merged the joyous ecstatic spirit of
exhilarating entertainment with a political agenda aimed toward progressive
political change. Within this festive revolutionary theater, progressive
elements of political change would be linked with notions of social
renewal. Moving spectators to join the fun, to become part of the concrete
action of social change.”

If you’re one of those ambitious technological types, you might try out one
of the items on the
Evil Genius List of Hi-Tech Practical Joke Ideas
(my favorite: “Carve computer-generated ripples in the surface of a main
highway, and when vehicles pass over the surface, mysterious voices
whisper, and distant music plays.”)